old for a young man, and too young for an old one, or rather let me say too much of a poet. The older the bird, the harder to catch. And then you see, my friend, I was once devoted to a girl who did not care for me--one I tell you the like of whom will never be seen again. So now I am too proud, or whatever it may be called, to be flattered even if some common-place creature--of whom there are twelve to the dozen--were to fancy me. I prefer to dream myself happy in my verses, and to shape myself a perfect beauty out of a hundred incomplete ones, like the Grecian painter--was his name Apelles?--who took for his Venus the eyes of one neighbour, the nose of another, and thus got the best together bit by bit. But as for her who really did unite all perfections, and was so beautiful that you would not believe me if I tried to describe her, she paid dear for her beauty, and many know the story as correctly as I do, though if you were to ask any of the older people in the place about Erminia, they would all bear me out that she was a wonder of the world, and that during the twenty years that have passed by since then, nothing has ever happened that made such an impression as her fate and all connected with it. Come now, I will tell it you, as you already know the sonnets to her--I allude to the sixty-seven that I keep in the blue portfolio, of which you said that they really had much of Petrarch's manner; they all date from the time when the wound was still fresh; and when once, you have heard the story you can hear them over again. It is only so that you will thoroughly understand them."

After which, with a sigh that sounded to me rather comic than tragic, he snuffed the candle, leant back in the arm-chair behind his counter, half-closed his eyes, and buried his hands in the side-pockets of his worn-out paletot. It was about nine o'clock in the evening. The Piazza before the house was still as death, one heard only the prattling of the brook, and the heavy breathing of the apprentice asleep in the next room. Then after a long pause he began with his usual exordium.

"Ecco amico mio, the matter stands thus. Somewhere about the year '30--you are too young to remember so far back--this said Erminia lived here in the village with a mother and sister who are also dead and buried long ago. If when you leave this door, you turn to the right up the little street leading to the old ruin on the summit of our hill, you will come to a small house, or rather hovel, roofless now except for two worm-eaten beams, and even then it was not much better protected from sun and rain; only that the great fig-tree that is withered now, used at that time to spread its broad thick-leaved branches over it just at the season when shade was most needed. In those bare stone walls that had formerly served as a shelter to wild creatures, Erminia lived. Her father had been dead for years, her mother had no idea of management, so that the family had come down wofully, and were glad enough to be allowed to nestle down in those ruins. There were, indeed, many who would have been glad to support the widow for her husband's sake. But you know how the proverb runs:

It was all in vain. The girls who were thoroughly well-behaved, might work their fingers to the bone, spinning and lace-making, and the neighbours might do their part as well as they could, the old woman drank everything up, and if she was not raging like a fury, she would lie on the hearth and sleep, and leave her daughters to find food and clothing for all. I do believe if their next neighbour, the fig-tree, had not done its part so gallantly, that Erminia and her sister Maddalena would both have died of hunger, for they were too proud to beg. Raiment, indeed, the tree could not afford them, since we no longer live in Paradise. Consequently everybody was astonished to see the poor things come to church so neatly dressed, the more that there was not a word to be said against them. True the younger of the two, Maddalena was thoroughly safe from temptation, for she was as ugly as sin, a short, unkempt, club-footed creature, with long arms and short legs, having a gait much like that of a toad, and frightening the children in the street if she came upon them unexpectedly.

"But she knew quite well how unsightly she was, and for the most part kept at home, doing, however, no harm to anyone, which is not often the case with such afflicted creatures, who are generally envious and spiteful by way of revenging themselves for their misfortune. She, on the contrary, seemed to look upon it as in the order of things that her mother, after bringing into the world one child so boundlessly beautiful as Erminia, should have had nothing but nature's refuse left for a second. Instead of looking askance at her elder sister, and wishing to poison her, she made so perfect an idol of her, that none of the young men about were more in love with Erminia than the poor fright Maddalena. And indeed Erminia was one that to see was to love. I for my part had seen all the statues in Rome, Muses, Venuses, Minervas, no small master-pieces, but such triumphs of art as the world cannot equal. And yet, between ourselves, utter failures compared to what nature had done. Look you, friend,"--and so saying the little man jumped up and raised his arm--"she was so tall, about a head taller than I am, but so beautifully formed; her little head so gracefully set on her magnificent bust, that no one found out how tall she was. And then her face, chiselled as it were, with large eyes richly eyelashed, and an expression proud and sweet both; a mouth red as a strawberry, or rather the inside of a white fig, and her brow crowned with thick blue-black curly hair, which she bound up behind into such a heavy nest of ringlets that it needed as stately a throat as hers to bear their burden. And then when she moved, walked, raised her arms to steady the basket she carried on her head, with her taper fingers turned, as it were, out of ivory; and her little feet in their coarse wooden shoes--amico mio, if I had not been a poet, that girl would have made me one. As for the others who had not a drop of poet blood in their veins, at least she made them mad, which is half-way to the Temple of Apollo. There was not a young fellow in the place who would not have had his left hand cut off, if only he might have worn her ring on the right. But she would listen to none of them, which was the more surprising when you considered the poverty she lived in, and that of the offers made to her, the very worst would at least have saved her, her mother, and her sister from any further distress. Of myself I will not speak. Madly in love as I was, I had still sense enough left to see that I was not worthy of her, and after I had in some degree got over the pain of my rejection, I told her that I would at least be her friend at all times, and she gave me her hand, and thanked me with such a smile. Sir, at that moment I was more crazy than ever! But there was another that everybody thought would outbid us all, and although we might have grudged her to him, still we should not have had a word to say against her choice. This was the son of the landlord of the Croce d'oro, a handsome fellow, rolling in money, and about two-and-twenty, a couple of inches taller than Erminia; generally called Barbarossa, or merely Il Rosso, on account of his having with light curly hair, a fine red beard of his own; but his real name was Domenico Serone. He paid his court to Erminia in such a way that nothing else was talked of, went on like one distracted, while she dismissed him just as she had done the rest of us, without positive disdain. She only gave him to understand that he might spare himself any